A question of hyphens….

Hi, y’all,

Sorry to be so non-communicative. Been working on getting Ring of Lightning ready to post and it’s proven to be more work than I’d expected. The file I had was the original that I sent to DAW, but a) it was written in Volkswriter, which meant some manipulation, esp to resurrect italics, and b) there were some things about that version that always bugged me, so I went through it line by line, mostly to get rid of word salad, but also to adjust some relationship issues that become much more important in the subsequent books (those things you don’t know when you begin a story…)

Anyway…then I figured I should go back and check the copyedits to insert whatever was valid in them . . . including the changes I’d made by hand … and they were as strange as I remembered them. I mean, there were the changes due to stylistic issues we had, which I’ve just ignored. i.e. single vs double quotes for ironic use of language in prose as opposed to actual dialog, and spelling issues…grey vs gray, traveling vs travelling…that sort of thing, but I was looking for the (very small…as in fewer than ten?) typo errors (it’s vs its) that spellcheckers don’t catch (I caught more in my line by line) but mostly, it’s the on-going question of…you got it, hyphens.

When I submitted the ms back in the pre-internet dark ages, I’d run the VW spellchecker and I got a lot of words it didn’t recognize that were two words “run together” so I hyphenated them to be on the safe side (except for my created terms). In the copyedits, it was sooooo weird. It was like, everything I hyphenated, the CE ran together and then the CE inserted hyphens in instances that even the spellchecker recognized as a single word. A word I ran together one time and hyphenated the next would quite reliably be reversed by the CE.

One of my favorite examples: storm-wracked. The CE wanted stormwracked, something I’d never ever ever have even considered and which cannot be justified by any dictionary I’ve found. And some of you wonder why we’re amused at the notion that our editing might somehow be lacking compared to books that have come out of the NY sieve. 

Fortunately, this time I have access online to a much more complete dictionary than the spellchecker dictionary in WordPerfect, so I’m checking as I go along. Which all takes time. But I’m getting there. Hopefully RoL will be available in a couple of days.